Planes carrying IS-linked family members land in Australia, with police expected to make arrests | Australian security and counter-terrorism
13 women and children who were detained in concentration camps in Syria for more than seven years following the collapse of the Islamic State have arrived in Australia.
One of the women, Janai Safar, was detained by Australian federal police officers shortly after she and her child landed in Sydney from Doha on Thursday evening.
Passengers on the plane said they saw four officers board the plane and escort three people off the plane, including a man, a woman and a child.
Some of the women are expected to be arrested and face possible criminal charges, including terrorism and slavery-related crimes, with AFP due to provide an update later on Thursday.
The plane, believed to be carrying Kawsar Abbas, his eldest daughters Zahra and Zeinab, and their eight children, landed in Melbourne at around 17.30 on Thursday, after the journey started from Damascus on Wednesday. Shortly after the plane landed in Melbourne, four Australian federal police officers were seen in the airport’s international arrivals hall.
There was also a police presence in the arrivals hall at Sydney airport.
Guardian Australia attempted to contact family members and legal representatives of all four women.
Lina Giraldo, who was on the flight from Doha to Sydney, said she saw three people sitting across from her – a man, a woman and a child – being taken off the plane by four people.
He said two of the people were wearing suits and the other two were wearing dark blue police uniforms. He said the cabin crew made an announcement for the passengers to sit and wait before the passengers were led away.
Another passenger in Sydney said he saw three people being taken off the plane.
The return to Australia caps a remarkable saga for the women, who all spent more than a decade in the Middle East, first under Islamic State rule and then in squalid concentration camps after escaping the violent end of the so-called caliphate.
But the possibility of criminal charges and increasingly fraught political debates about whether they pose a threat mean that relocating them will not be easy.
The immediate future for their children, some born in detention camps, is expected to include a range of support, including medical, educational, psychological and de-radicalisation programmes, many of which are coordinated by state governments.
On Wednesday morning, the government was warned about the planned departure of the group that left Roj and went to Damascus last month. They all have Australian passports.
Home secretary Tony Burke said later the same day: “As we have said many times, any member of this group who commits an offense can expect to face the full force of the law.”
AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett said the adults in the group faced arrest and possible charges when they arrived in Australia.
He said AFP officers have been investigating the women since 2015 and also collected evidence from Syria as part of the operation.
Charges may include terrorist crimes, such as entering or remaining in declared areas, and “crimes against humanity”, such as engaging in the slave trade.
Abbas’s husband, Mohammad Ahmad, traveled to Syria in 2012, where he carried out aid work with Global Humanitarian Aid Australia, a registered charity. During this period, he went back and forth between Türkiye and Syria.
But AFP suspects he is using the charity to support the Islamic State. He denied supporting the terrorist group in a 2019 interview with the ABC from a Syrian prison.
In another interview with the ABC in 2023, he also denied allegations that he mistreated Yazidi women while they were held as slaves in his family home in Syria.
Abbas traveled to Türkiye with his extended family in 2014, but Ahmed claimed the family became stranded in Syria the same year after traveling to the country to attend a wedding.
The group’s return means there are now around 21 Australians in detention camps, which are being gradually evacuated and will be closed, according to local media reports.
Mat Tinkler, CEO of Save the Children Australia, said the return of other women and children, and other western nations successfully reintegrating their citizens, meant “the temperature needs to be completely turned down” regarding the group.
“We need to focus on what happens to these women when they come, and we heard from the AFP commissioner about that today, and we also need to focus on giving these children the space to recover, to survive, to thrive,” Tinkler told the ABC on Wednesday.
“Two-thirds of this group we are talking about in Syria consists of children.
“There has been so much focus on women and the choices they may have made, but we need to focus on these children and give them the chance to continue a normal life in Australia.”
The group began its second attempt to reach Australia last month after a much larger group was turned away by Syrian authorities in February.
The US has forced countries including Australia to repatriate citizens who had traveled to the Middle East to join ISIS’s caliphate, but the problem has dogged successive governments.
Under Albanese, Labor had backed bringing families home as recently as 2022, but policies on the group’s return have changed dramatically since the Bondi beach shootings in December.
Albanese refused to help in any way, saying the adults had “made their bed” and should face the consequences of their actions.
